The State of the American Man

Bruce Willis, 45, Actor, Los Angeles

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Jan 29, 2007

When I was a kid, I stuttered. Really bad--I could hardly get a sentence out. When you're a stutterer, there's always this nagging feeling in the back of your head, scratching on a nerve. You're making people uncomfortable because they want to help you, so they try to finish your sentence, and it makes you stutter even more because now you're locked into this cycle. My parents helped me by just treating me normally. Compassion and love are great tools under those circumstances.

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When you're confronted with adversity, you have two choices: Succumb to it, or walk through the fire. I thought, Yes, I stutter. But if I can make you laugh, maybe I can take your mind off it. Like a magic trick. So I always tried to crack my friends up, doing things that were funny to people at that age at that time, though they certainly weren't very funny to my teachers.

I didn't want my stutter to hold me back, so I took a part in a school play. Must've been eighth grade. I went onstage and it was miraculous: The stutter vanished. Then, when I came off the stage, it came right back. Any role that took me out of who I really was took away the stutter. It made me want to act more and more. I white-knuckled the stuttering for years and eventually beat it. By the time I got to college, I knew I wanted to be an actor.

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I lost a couple of friends to freak accidents in my early twenties. Around that time, my brother was hit by a car while crossing a highway. He got thrown about sixty feet in the air and spent six months in the hospital. Then my sister was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. She's in complete remission, but there was a short period of time when we thought she was going to die. So I've almost always had an awareness of how fragile life is. They say pain is for the living; when you die, the suffering's over. I believe that. It's a hard thing to wrap your mind around--whether you're thinking about your own death or somebody else's.

I spent my twenties in New York City--probably the craziest time in my life. It still brings a smile to my face. The only responsibility I had was to get to the theater on time. No worries. At twenty-five, you've got millions of brain cells to kill.

Then I became a television star, then a movie star. I got swept up by the cult of fame and came to understand the misfortune of good fortune. That is, the loss of your anonymity. TV shows, movies, magazine interviews, TV interviews, gossip--they all create a hologram of who people think I am. It's all an illusion. Just like the illusion of religion or power. There were times I thought it was really screwed up and railed against it. Now I just accept it. So you'll excuse me if I don't talk about my personal life here. I have so little privacy that the little I do have I fight to keep control over.

I have an acute awareness of friendship because of my experiences being famous. Most of my friends know me from a time when I didn't have much money. To a man, they all help me not take it seriously.

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There was a time in my life when there was no separation between life and work. But having rocks thrown at me after Hudson Hawk allowed me to step back and separate the two. When I work now, I simply try to do what every man does: the best I can.

When I was a kid, forty-five seemed old. Really old. I don't really feel the years on my shoulders, but I see the lines in my face. That's what laughing for a long time will do. In my heart, I'm still twenty-five, but I know I'm forty-five. I've stopped drinking. Having kids is a good reason not to be drunk. I want to stick around for my kids. I want to be able to run around with their kids.

There's that painting of a man walking, starting from when he was a tiny infant. He's walking and walking, growing upright and powerful, and then getting older and older until he's hunched over and can hardly stand anymore. Every guy should have that painting on his wall. That way he can get up every day and say, "Here's where I am on the timeline." If you looked at that painting every day and asked yourself, How many summers do I have left? you'd waste a lot less time. You die so quickly, even if you do live to be ninety. Live it up, that's what I say. Live it up every moment, every hour, every day, because it'll all be over in a finger snap. I'm pretty sure that most people are surprised by their own death.

[ MICHAEL EISNER ] 58 / CEO/ Los Angeles

You always wonder, How would I act if I was standing on the deck of the Titanic as it went down? Your fear is that you'd hyperventilate and act like a fool.

In 1994, I felt pain in my arms while I was at a conference in Idaho. I attributed it to tension from the job, but I was uncomfortable, so I flew home and went for a stress test. As soon as I got on the treadmill, my arms began to ache. The doctor stopped me after four minutes. Next thing I knew, an angiogram was being recommended.

"This is moving so fast," my wife said.

"Jane," I said, "get on the bandwagon. Let's get serious and stop denying."

When the pictures came up on the screen, even I could see the blockage. My father had heart problems in his fifties. When he had quadruple-bypass surgery, I sensed that it was my genetic destiny. Destiny is one thing, but when the doctor recommends that you have a coronary bypass immediately, you're shocked.

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The preoperative scene was somewhat bizarre. I was in la-la land. Two of my three sons showed up. My wife hadn't been able to locate our youngest. I found myself negotiating with her. "I have three requests," I said. It was like a B movie. I used the leverage of being critically ill to talk her out of plans to build a house that I wasn't crazy about. I described where and how I wanted to be buried. Then I detailed my succession ideas for the Disney chairmanship. She looked at me as though I were insane. "Fine, fine," she said. Then she kissed me and told me everything would be all right.

I don't remember feeling fear as I went under. What I remember is seeing my middle son, Eric. He was twenty at the time. He looked so downtrodden. I've always been much more upset by a failure of one of my children than I've been with my own failures, just as I've always been much more elated by their successes than my own. I became upset because Eric looked so upset. I was twenty-five years older than him when my father passed away in his mid-seventies. The fact that he died in the normal passage of life doesn't take away the unhappiness, grief, or loss. But losing a father at twenty would have had a different effect. Seeing that look on his face--that's what stays with me.

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When I woke up, I thought it was the best night's sleep I'd had in a long time.

I'd been told that with this operation comes a reanalysis of your existence, and with this different sense of purpose comes a certain sense of terror, but I don't think the bypass made any fundamental changes in me. I feel as if I'm the same basic person I was when I was six, though educated and a little wiser. That's not to say there haven't been changes. I get on the treadmill when I'd rather be in bed. I altered my diet. I eat stuff that you wouldn't want to feed a cow. My wife carries around my salad dressing in her pocketbook. I don't know what it's made of. Nonfat something. It's hard to sit at lunches with people who are having Welsh rarebit while you're drinking water. At this point in my life, I wish meals could be over in ten minutes.

There are certain things that you loved as a kid that you can't have anymore if you want to live the life you love. I mean, I used to love Chuckles. Come to think of it, there's no fat in Chuckles. Just sugar. Hmmm. Maybe Chuckles would be fine. . . . You just have to put those things out of your mind.

People always ask why I don't retire. A lot of guys in their mid-fifties are looking for the perfect golf course. Not me. I'm still looking for the perfect movie.

It's never been about the money for me--ever. Power? I'll say this: It's great to be able to pick up the phone and talk to the world's most creative people. But I've always put my family first and my job second. I've been married more than thirty years, and if I had the chance, I'd do it all over again in a second.

Here's what it really comes down to: I'm still doing what I love to do. Okay, there are serious meetings with serious balance sheets, and to the extent that we can stay awake, we pay attention. But there's something creative and stimulating in every day. And I really enjoy floating a crazy idea and having twenty people around me agreeing and disagreeing, then seeing if it will succeed or fail.

Why give up something that you love?

[ WALTER HARKINS ] 65 / Retired detective/ Myrtle Beach

Here, you turn on the TV and the weatherman won't admit it's raining--even as you look out the window and see it coming down cats and dogs. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, is a resort town. It's always a sunny day in Myrtle Beach.

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I retired two years ago, after thirty-nine years with the New York Police Department. Homicide detective. Life is a little different for me now. A lot of times, my day used to start with an autopsy. Once you smell death, you never forget it. There's no other smell like it. It stays on you like a skunk. When I'd get home at night, I'd have to leave my clothes outside--my shoes especially. One morning, I went to an autopsy with a guy who didn't really know what it was like. He had on a wool sweater because it was cold out. "Don't bring your sweater down there," I told him. He said, "Nah, nah" and kept the sweater on. We went downstairs, and we're looking at the poor cadaver as its skull is sawed open. We get our work done, go back to the car, and the guy goes, "Ughhhh, the smell's all over me!" So that was the start of the morning. You want eggs and coffee after that?

My grandfather was a policeman. He joined the force in 1884 in Brooklyn. My first memory is seeing the stripes of my father's police uniform as I lay in bed. I must have been two years old. The oldest of my three sons is a cop, too. You got people who say to cops, "Hey, the pension's good." But it isn't good for what you did. I mean, think of stopping a bad guy at three in the morning, or knocking on a door and hearing the click click of a gun. That doesn't happen every day, but it only needs to happen once. One guy I know--good guy--was working his last day before he retired, and he went uptown and got shot in the face. Last day! He didn't get killed, but . . .

Your family takes a big hit, timewise. After a kidnapping in October of 1964, I didn't have a day off until March 1. My wife was going to church on Sundays like she's a widow because I'm working all the time. People would meet her and say, "Lady, if anybody deserves a medal, it's you!"

Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of great days. Days of elation when you've been waiting and waiting to get the guy who's killed somebody, and there he is on the corner. Days of bringing in the guy who'd killed a cop. Every day for thirty-nine years, I was there when people needed me.

These days, I wake up early and have the cereal I set in the refrigerator the night before, with the cut-up bananas at the bottom so they won't brown. I play golf or go to the beach. I paint on tiles. Occasionally, I'll talk on the phone with my three-year-old grandson. The day just goes by. At night, my wife and I might go out for an early dinner. Then I pick up a book and go to bed. I don't really remember my dreams now. It's strange: In my dreams while I was working, I could never kill anybody or be killed. The bullets stopped before they could get there.

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I've often wondered what heaven looks like. I guess everybody's heaven would look different. If you were a horse player, you'd be hitting trifectas all over the place. But what does it actually look like?

I know people who've been shot and literally come back from the dead. I've spoken to people who were in the tunnel with the white light, and everything was peaceful and they wanted to continue. And yet they came back. One guy, he didn't want to come back. He told me, "It wasn't my time to go, but it was a very nice feeling."

You know how people always talk about going to meet your maker? I could look at all the things I've done in my life and not be afraid to walk through that door. Yeah, I could go.

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Sometimes you're in a group and you look around and you may not have the best suit or the best shoes or the best haircut, but you know there's nobody in the room who can hold a candle to you; you were a New York detective. And that's just it. Some guy may have thirty or forty million dollars. But he never did what you did. Tonight, at about 10:30, I'll go to bed and put my head on that pillow, and I'll sleep very well.

[ T. BOONE PICKENS ] 72 / Tycoon/ Dallas

One of the things that happens when you get older is your ear hairs really start growing. Can't stand 'em, so I wax 'em out. Barber pours the wax around my ears, lets it settle, then pulls. You can hear a ripping noise as the hairs come out.

You picked an interesting time to talk to me about getting older. If you were looking at my business life on a graph, I guess you'd say my peak was in the mid-eighties, when I was on the cover of Time and Fortune. They called me a corporate raider, but it wasn't that way at all. I just tried to take over companies that should have been ten times their size but couldn't get off the ground because of bad management. I was like that piece of art on that shelf over there, the sculpture of that little fish trying to eat the great big one.

Four or five years ago, the line on the graph bottomed out. Mesa, our company, had problems after gas prices fell, and we borrowed to pay stockholders. I lost control of it and had to leave. At the same time, I was involved in a very difficult divorce.

There isn't anybody who doesn't like to see an old man make a comeback. Jimmy Connors seemed like a jerk to me until he was forty. After that, I rooted for him all the time. How could you not?

I'm seventy-two now. Last year I made more money than I did in any other year of my life. We ran $4.3 million into $250 million, and we're cooking up some big plans. We're investing in a plan to pump water to some thirsty cities in Texas. Haven't gotten a penny back yet, but it's gonna be big.

Best of all, I got married. It's my third. My first was to my high school sweetheart. We had different interests, but that's easy to overlook when you're the high school basketball star and she's the prettiest girl in the class. We didn't have any money, and I was working long hours, and we grew apart. We decided to stick it out for our four kids, which was probably a mistake, and we divorced after twenty-two years.

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I married my next wife way too quick; if I'd waited six months longer, it wouldn't have happened. We had some good years, then some not so good ones. Like the first time, I honestly believed I was gonna work it out. But after twenty-four years, it ended with great struggle. You definitely wouldn't identify me as a hit-and-run.

I've got seventeen grandchildren, but I don't see them all because my second wife won't allow it. I do wish I had a better relationship with some of my kids. Last year, I wrote them a letter and took the blame for everything. We all make mistakes. We're all adults now. I hope we can move on and work it out.

Nelda and I scared each other. She hadn't been married in six years, and I hadn't been married in four years, and we thought, Ohhhh, what are we getting ourselves into? To give you an idea about her, when she was forty-nine, she was at a dinner where people were asking the one thing in the world they would do if they could. She said, "Get big hair and a bus and become a country-western singer." Then she went to Nashville and put out a beautiful CD. I just love her heart.

Now, she being fifty-two and me being seventy-two, her son said, "There's only one problem about the age difference. Mom, you'd better work out if you want to keep up with him." See, there's not many men my age in my kind of shape. I bench-press 120 pounds, curl 30 pounds, do squats, lunges with 15-pound weights in my hands. . . .

All relationships go through periods of infatuation and friendship. Nelda and I were off and on, then we were together for two weeks solid, as if we were trying to wear the other one out. During that time, we knew we didn't want it to end. So we woke up at the ranch on Thanksgiving morning, and I said, "Let's do the deal."

"We can't get married today," she said. "You can't do it in one day. Besides, this is Thanksgiving. Everything's closed."

And I said, "I don't believe you understand how big a man I am in Roberts County, Texas."

I called the preacher and a judge who waived the three-day wait. My daughter Liz made a bouquet of roses. We got a boom box from one of the ranch hands and a tape of Jim Nabors singing "Ave Maria." The preacher calls the Lord's Prayer, and I get a big frog in my throat and can hardly say "I do." Liz was throwing rose petals on us as we walked out of the church--only we didn't get it with the camera quick enough, so we had to pick 'em up, put 'em in the basket, and do it again. Then we went home and sat down to Thanksgiving dinner about an hour later.

We've got it right this time. We're not going to book another loss. The way this ends, somebody goes out feetfirst.

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But I've never felt old. I truly believe there isn't anything I've done in life that I can't do better right now.

[ EDDIE FUTCH ] 89 / Boxing trainer/ Las Vegas

must've been five when I heard a noise I'd never heard before. It was a roaring sound coming from the other side of a hill, and I asked my father about it. "That's an automobile," he said. Now, this was rural Mississippi in 1916, a time and place of pack animals. "What's an automobile?" I asked, and my father said, "It's a wagon that runs without horses." I tried and tried, but I just couldn't picture it. When it came over the top of the hill, I was amazed. It was moving without any horses. I got to thinking: How could that be? I thought and thought and said to myself, Maybe it just started at the top of the hill; that's how it came down. Then I thought, But how did it get to the top of the hill? To this day, I always wonder about things I don't understand and try to figure them out. There are so many people who never stop to think about why and how.

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You need to think like that to be a cornerman: why and how. Because boxing is a game of physical chess. The fight everybody remembers me from is the Thrilla in Manila, when I wouldn't let Joe Frazier come out for the fifteenth round against Muhammad Ali. But there were others, too. I trained twenty-one world champions. Larry Holmes, Riddick Bowe, Ken Norton, Michael Spinks . . .

Since August 9, 1911, I've seen it all. I've known the day when black people were second in line. Nearly got killed by five white guys while I was working at a hotel in Chicago after they saw a white girl talking to me. Was a white man who saved my life. I can remember when Nat King Cole got a fifteen-minute television show and there was such a protest that they had to take it off the air. Joe Louis and I used to spar together. Jackie Robinson? I can remember Jack Johnson! Now here I am in the year 2001, married to a forty-year-old blond-haired woman from Sweden named Eva, and everybody accepts it like it's perfectly fine. America is a better place than it was eighty-nine years ago, but it's still got a lot of improving to do.

It all comes down to the capacity to understand. When you get to my age, you look at younger people who may be going the wrong way, dealing with things you dealt with years ago, and you say, "Why can't they see? Why can't they understand?" If I could help everyone understand one thing, it would be: It's not hard to do the right thing.

Some things you can never understand. The youngest of my four children died of cancer at fifty-one. My oldest daughter died after her fiftieth wedding anniversary. Losing a child is an emptiness so deep and profound, there are no words for it. I don't know if you ever deal with it.

Nobody believes me, but some of the physical changes that come with age are psychological. I was basically doing the same thing in my early eighties that I was doing in my thirties. Then my sister died. She and I were close for eighty-five years, and the day after she was buried, I lay down in my backyard and couldn't get up, just couldn't walk. My balance was gone.

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I've been married to Eva for five years now. I'd met her a couple of times at the gym, and one day she left a message at training camp like this: "Tell Eddie I want his body." I thought it was a joke. I didn't know she was a physical therapist! I guess I'd started to hunch over by that time. She explained that once you start hunching over, gravity hits the back of your head and you keep going. You have to educate the tissues to go the other way. I invited her to my room. She had a portable table, equipment, and cameras. She took pictures of me front and side, then put on her uniform, and I said, "This is for real!" She proceeded with the massage, and I went right to sleep. After an hour, I stood, and my posture was better. She asked if I wanted another session, and I said, "How about tomorrow?!" I took her out to dinner and, well, here we are. . . .

You know, when I was young, I was taken to a library. I opened a book to a poem called The Rubáiyát, but I was too young to understand it. I got older, went back to the library, read it, and understood. That's life. You just hope to get older and understand.

[ DR. MICHAEL E. DEBAKEY ] 92 / Heart surgeon / Houston

There are similarities, but each heart is a little different. Just like every individual is a little different. While it's true that it's a pump, I never think of the heart as a mechanical thing. It's awesome and in many ways almost spiritual--the seat of life-giving. Over the years, I've done sixty thousand operations. Heart surgeries constitute perhaps a third of those operations. That's about twenty thousand hearts I've touched.

From my earliest memory, I wanted to be a doctor. It may well be because I associated with the doctors who'd come by my father's drugstore. I don't know. As a boy, I once was miserable with malaria--high fever and shaking--and when the doctor came, I always felt better.

But a person doesn't have to be a doctor to be compassionate. Everyone can help others, simply by taking the attitude of being kind. If we could just remember that, our lives, our society, would be far better off.

When I was growing up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, we had a little orphanage that my parents would go to every Sunday afternoon. My mother would fix a basket of food, and she would give away the clothes that we had outgrown. I must've been eight or nine when I saw her put one of my old favorite caps into the basket, and I protested. "You have a new cap," she said to me. "And children at the orphanage do not have parents to give them a new cap." You see, I still remember that. Children aren't born with kindness; they aren't born to tell the truth. They have to be taught. The values you should live by are values that you might say are old-fashioned, but the reason they're old-fashioned is that they're time-tested.

A good, basic value is to give your children attention. Because children need attention, and if they don't get it from you, they'll get it from somebody else. Children can tell very well if you love them, and love is the most important attribute an individual can have. Because if you truly love, you have integrity. And you can't embrace all the good values if you don't have integrity.

I still live with the values I grew up with. When we came home from school, there was much to do. We were taught never to waste time. In college, I got a bachelor's degree at the same time I finished my second year of medical school. I still don't like to waste time. I've trained myself to go to sleep when I want. On an airplane, I can doze off in a minute and wake up when the plane lands. That way, I don't have jet lag.

I don't spend much time eating. I can still fit into my World War II uniform. Maybe I'll have a glass of juice in the morning. I'll generally pass up lunch and have a simple dinner--fresh vegetables and fish. Maybe once a week I'll have a steak.

I go to bed around midnight, and I'm up at five. I'm rarely frustrated because I'm always working to accomplish an objective and then getting great pleasure out of achievement.

Every time I successfully do an operation of any kind--like the first coronary bypass in '64--it's kind of a celebration. Happiness is the reward of success. At the moment, I'm most interested in developing a little heart pump for patients who need heart transplants. We've had people who have been on the pump for as long as eight months, waiting for a heart donor, then successfully had a heart transplant when the donor was found. My interest is to ultimately get to a point where we can use the pump as a permanent heart implant.

My first wife had a heart attack. I was operating, and they called and said, "Your wife is having an emergency." I stepped out of the operating room and rushed to her room, but by the time I got there, she was gone. There's a tremendous emptiness, especially because it happened so suddenly. Those experiences affect you, no question about it. I think that's when you begin to accept death as a part of life.

Fortunately, at that time I had a very busy schedule. I was immersed in my work so much that the only time I felt the emptiness was at night, when I would go to bed. And that time was very short. I was lucky, too. Within six years, I met my present wife, and that filled the emptiness.

Wisdom from the past? I don't know exactly what to tell you, but a doctor once told me: The essence of wisdom is the ability to make the right decision on the basis of inadequate evidence.

The future? This new century that we're in, it's going to be one of the most exciting in all of history. The medical advances that have taken place since World War II are amazing. I would say this is the best time in the history of the world to be a six-year-old boy. Oh, yes. By far, by far.